Facebook and Instagram suffer worldwide outage, hackers take credit

Facebook said it had suffered a self inflicted outage lasting for an hour on Tuesday that made its site inaccessible to users worldwide.

A Facebook statement said the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site and wasn’t a cyberattack. A group called the Lizard Squad claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages, report ABC news “This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” Facebook said.

The Mail Online reports: Hundreds of millions of people worldwide were unable to use Facebook and Instagram for around an hour today after an alleged cyber attack.

The online group Lizard Squad have claimed they hacked the two sites at around 6am GMT – but Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire says it was just a technical fault.

Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States, Europe and Asia for around an hour.

The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has denied they were hacked and blamed the outage on ‘a change that affected our configuration systems’.

The Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the hacking of Malaysia Airlines yesterday and Sony and Xbox in the past month